by Otto Penzler
“Holmes,” I cried, “I thought you were dead.”
A spasm of pain shot across his mobile brow.
“Couldn’t you trust me better than that?” he asked, sadly. “I will explain. Can you spare me a moment?”
“Certainly,” I answered. “I have an obliging friend who would take my practice for that time.”
He looked keenly at me for answer. “My dear, dear Watson,” he said, “you have lost your clinical thermometer.”
“My dear Holmes—” I began, in astonishment.
He pointed to a fairly obvious bulge in his throat.
“I was your patient,” he said.
“Is it going still?” I asked, anxiously.
“Going fast,” he said, in a voice choked with emotion.
A twinge of agony dashed across his mobile brow. (Holmes’s mobility is a byword in military Clubs.) In a little while the bulge was gone.
“But why, my dear Holmes—”
He held up his hand to stop me, and drew out an old cheque-book.
“What would you draw from that?” he asked.
“The balance,” I suggested, hopefully.
“What conclusion I meant?” he snapped.
I examined the cheque-book carefully. It was one on Lloyd’s Bank, half-empty, and very, very old. I tried to think what Holmes would have deduced, but with no success. At last, determined to have a dash for my money, I said:
“The owner is a Welshman.”
Holmes smiled, picked up the book, and made the following rapid diagnosis of the case:
“He is a tall man, right-handed, and a good boxer; a genius on the violin, with an unrivalled knowledge of criminal London, extraordinary powers of perception, a perfectly enormous brain; and, finally, he has been hiding for some considerable time.”
“Where?” I asked, too interested to wonder how he had deduced so much from so little.
“In Portland.”
He sat down, snuffed the ash of my cigar, and remarked:
“Ah! Flor—de—Dindigul—I—see,—do—you—follow—me—Watson?” Then, as he pulled down his “Encyclopaedia Britannica” from its crate, he added:
“It is my own cheque-book.”
“But Moriarty?” I gasped.
“There is no such man,” he said. “It is merely the name of a soup.”
From a Detective’s Notebook
P. G. WODEHOUSE
ONE OF THE most popular and beloved humorists of the twentieth century, Sir Pelham “Plum” Grenville Wodehouse (1881–1975) had a long, illustrious, and prolific literary career that began with works in several genres, including straightforward detective stories. “From a Detective’s Notebook” is similar to some of his later ventures into the literature of mystery or crime, which are generally nonsensical, such as Hot Water (1932), Pigs Have Wings (1952), and Do Butlers Burgle Banks? (1968).
As a young man he became a banker, but by the time he was twenty-two, he was earning more as a writer than as a banker and resigned to devote his full time to producing short stories, novels, and occasional pieces, which he did with enormous success for the next seven decades. His first novel was The Pothunters (1902), but his greatest creations, the Hon. Bertie Wooster and his friend and valet, Jeeves, did not make their appearance until The Saturday Evening Post published “Extricating Young Gussie” in 1915. Wooster is the good-hearted but intellectually challenged young man who ceaselessly finds himself in difficulties with his aunt, a girl, or the law, relying on Jeeves to get him out of trouble.
For much of his life, Wodehouse spent half his time in America and half in England; he became a U.S. citizen in 1955. He wrote scores of screenplays and teleplays beginning in 1930, and provided the book and lyrics for numerous musicals, including Anything Goes (1934), for which he wrote the book with Guy Bolton; Cole Porter wrote the music and lyrics.
Shortly before his death, he was given a knighthood as Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
“From a Detective’s Notebook” was first published in the May 1959 issue of Punch; it was first collected in The World of Mr. Mulliner (London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1972).
FROM A DETECTIVE’S NOTEBOOK
P. G. Wodehouse
WE WERE SITTING round the club fire, old General Malpus, Driscoll the QC, young Freddie ffinch-ffinch and myself, when Adrian Mulliner, the private investigator, gave a soft chuckle. This was, of course, in the smoking-room, where soft chuckling is permitted.
“I wonder,” he said, “if it would interest you chaps to hear the story of what I always look upon as the greatest triumph of my career?”
We said No, it wouldn’t, and he began.
“Looking back over my years as a detective, I recall many problems the solution of which made me modestly proud, but though all of them undoubtedly presented certain features of interest and tested my powers to the utmost, I can think of none of my feats of ratiocination which gave me more pleasure than the unmasking of the man Sherlock Holmes, now better known as the Fiend of Baker Street.”
Here General Malpus looked at his watch, said “Bless my soul,” and hurried out, no doubt to keep some appointment which had temporarily slipped his mind.
“I had at first so little to go on,” Adrian Mulliner proceeded. “But just as a brief sniff at a handkerchief or shoe will start one of Mr. Thurber’s bloodhounds giving quick service, so is the merest suggestion of anything that I might call fishy enough to set me off on the trail, and what first aroused my suspicions of this sinister character was his peculiar financial position.
“Here we had a man who evidently was obliged to watch the pennies closely, for when we are introduced to him he is, according to Doctor Watson’s friend Stamford, ‘bemoaning himself because he could not find someone to go halves with him in some nice rooms which he had found and which were too much for his purse.’ Watson offers himself as a fellow lodger, and they settle down in—I quote—‘a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a large sitting-room at 221B Baker Street.’
“Now I never lived in Baker Street at the turn of the century, but I knew old gentlemen who had done so, and they assured me that in those days you could get a bedroom and sitting-room and three meals a day for a pound a week. An extra bedroom no doubt made the thing come higher, but thirty shillings must have covered the rent, and there was never a question of a man as honest as Doctor Watson failing to come up with his fifteen each Saturday. It followed, then, that even allowing for expenditure in the way of Persian slippers, tobacco, disguises, revolver cartridges, cocaine, and spare fiddle-strings, Holmes would have been getting by on a couple of pounds or so weekly. And with this modest state of life he appeared to be perfectly content. In a position where you or I would have spared no effort to add to our resources he simply did not bother about the financial side of his profession. Let us take a few instances at random and see what he made as a ‘consulting detective.’ Where are you going, Driscoll?”
“Out,” said the QC, suiting action to the word.
Adrian Mulliner resumed his tale.
“In the early days of their association Watson speaks of being constantly bundled off into his bedroom because Holmes needed the sitting-room for interviewing callers. ‘I have to use this room as a place of business,’ he said, ‘and these people are my clients.’ And who were these clients? ‘A grey-headed, seedy visitor, who was closely followed by a slipshod elderly woman,’ and after these came ‘a railway porter in his velveteen uniform.’ Not much cash in that lot, and things did not noticeably improve later, for we find his services engaged by a stenographer, an average commonplace British tradesman, a commissionaire, a City clerk, a Greek interpreter, a landlady (‘You arranged an affair for a lodger of mine last year’) and a Cambridge undergraduate.
“So far from making money as a consulting detective, he must have been a good deal out of pocket most of the time. In A Study in Scarlet Inspector Gregson says there has been a bad business during the night at 3 Lauriston Gardens o
ff the Brixton Road and he would esteem it a great kindness if Holmes would favour him with his opinions. Off goes Holmes in a hansom from Baker Street to Brixton, a fare of several shillings, dispatches a long telegram (another two or three bob to the bad), summons ‘half a dozen of the dirtiest and most ragged street Arabs that ever I clapped eyes on,’ and gives each of them a shilling, and finally, calling on Police Constable Bunce, the officer who discovered the body, takes half a sovereign from his pocket and after ‘playing with it pensively’ presents it to the constable. The whole affair must have cost him considerably more than a week’s rent at Baker Street, and no hope of getting it back from Inspector Gregson, for Gregson, according to Holmes himself, was one of the smartest of the Scotland Yarders.
“Inspector Gregson! Inspector Lestrade! These clients! I found myself thinking a good deal about them, and it was not long before the truth dawned upon me that they were merely cheap actors, hired to deceive Doctor Watson. For what would the ordinary private investigator have said to himself when starting out in business? He would have said, ‘Before I take on work for a client I must be sure that that client has the stuff. The daily sweetener and the little something down in advance are of the essence,’ and would have had those landladies and those Greek interpreters out of that sitting-room before you could say ‘blood-stain.’ Yet Holmes, who could not afford a pound a week for lodgings, never bothered. Significant?”
On what seemed to me the somewhat shallow pretext that he had to see a man about a dog, Freddie ffinch-ffinch now excused himself and left the room.
“Later,” Adrian Mulliner went on, “the thing became absolutely farcical, for all pretence that he was engaged in a gainful occupation was dropped by himself and the clients. I quote Doctor Watson: ‘He tossed a crumpled letter across to me. It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening and run thus:
Dear Mr. Holmes,—I am very anxious to consult you as to whether or not I should accept a situation which has been offered me as a governess. I shall call at half past ten tomorrow if I do not inconvenience you.
Yours faithfully,
Violet Hunter
“Now, the fee an investigator could expect from a governess, even one in full employment, could scarcely be more than a few shillings, yet when two weeks later Miss Hunter wired ‘please be at the Black Swan Hotel at Winchester at midday to-morrow,’ Holmes dropped everything and sprang into the 9:30 train.”
Adrian Mulliner paused and chuckled softly.
“You see where all this is heading?”
I said No, I didn’t. I was the only one there, and had to say something.
“Tut, tut, man! You know my methods. Apply them. Why is a man casual about money?”
“Because he has a lot of it.”
“Precisely.”
“But you said Holmes hadn’t.”
“I said nothing of the sort. That was merely the illusion he was trying to create.”
“Why?”
“Because he needed a front for his true activities. Sherlock Holmes had no need to worry about fees. He was pulling in the stuff in sackfulls from another source. Where is the big money? Where has it always been! In crime. Bags of it, and no income tax. If you want to salt away a few million for a rainy day you don’t spring into 9:30 trains to go and see governesses, you become a master criminal, sitting like a spider in the centre of its web and egging your corps of assistants on to steal jewels and naval treaties.”
“You mean…”
“Exactly. He was Professor Moriarty.”
“What was that name again?”
“Professor Moriarty.”
“The bird with the reptilian head?”
“That’s right.”
“But Holmes hadn’t a reptilian head.”
“Nor had Moriarty.”
“Holmes said he had.”
“And to whom? To Watson. So as to get the description given publicity. Watson never saw Moriarty. All he knew about him was what Holmes told him. Well, that’s the story, old man.”
“The whole story?”
“Yes.”
“There isn’t any more?”
“No.”
I chuckled softly.
The Ruby of Khitmandu
HUGH KINGSMILL
(Writing as Arth_r C_n_n D_yle and E. W. H_rn_ng)
THE ENGLISH AUTHOR, journalist, parodist, biographer, anthologist, and literary critic Hugh Kingsmill Lunn (1889–1949) dropped his last name as a partial pseudonym for what he described as professional reasons, perhaps in order not to be confused with his brothers, Arnold Lunn and Brian Lunn.
Although Kingsmill is described in numerous reference books as a mystery writer, among his other literary accomplishments, he did not, in fact, write a single crime novel, though he wrote some short stories in the genre, several of which were collected in a book of parodies, The Table of Truth (1933), which he has identified as one of his favorite books. Several of his biographies are notable, especially The Return of William Shakespeare (1929), Frank Harris (1932), Samuel Johnson (1933), and D. H. Lawrence (1938).
The dual byline on this story reflects the fame of the now somewhat-forgotten E. W. Hornung, the creator of Raffles, the notorious gentleman jewel thief. Although he appeared in only four books between 1899 and 1909, Raffles short stories vied with Sherlock Holmes in popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and it was not uncommon for parodists to match the nearly infallible detective against the equally successful safecracker.
“The Ruby of Khitmandu” was first published in the April 1932 issue of The Bookman; it was first collected in book form in the author’s The Table of Truth (London, Jarrolds, 1933).
THE RUBY OF KHITMANDU
Hugh Kingsmill
(Synopsis—The Maharajah of Khitmandu, who is staying at Claridge’s, is robbed of the famous Ruby of Khitmandu. Sherlock Holmes traces the theft to Raffles, who agrees to hand over the ruby to Holmes, on condition that he and his confederate Bunny are not proceeded against. Raffles has just explained the situation to Bunny. They are in the rooms of Raffles in the Albany.)
Chapter XV
(Bunny’s Narrative)
MY HEART FROZE at the incredible words which told me that Raffles, of all men, was throwing up the sponge without a struggle, was tamely handing over the most splendid of all the splendid trophies of his skill and daring to this imitation detective, after outwitting all the finest brains of the finest crime-investigating organization in the world. Suddenly the ice turned to fire, and I was on my feet, speaking as I had never spoken to living man before. What I said I cannot remember. If I could, I would not record it. I believe I wept. I know I went down on my knees. And Raffles sat there with never a word! I see him still, leaning back in a luxurious armchair, watching me with steady eyes sheathed by drooping lids. There was a faint smile on the handsome dare-devil face, and the hands were raised as if in deprecation; nor can I give my readers a more complete idea of the frenzy which had me in its grip than by recording the plain fact that I was utterly oblivious to the strangeness of the spectacle before me. Raffles apologetic, Raffles condescending to conciliate me—at any other time such a reversal of our natural rôles had filled me with unworthy exultation for myself, and bitter shame for him. But I was past caring now.
And then, still holding his palms towards me, he crossed them. I have said that during the telling of his monstrous decision he had the ruby between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Now the left hand was where the right had been, and the ruby was in it. I suppose I should have guessed at once, I suppose I should have read in his smile what it needed my own eyes to tell me, that there was a ruby in his right hand too! So that was the meaning of the upraised hands! I swear that my first sensation was a pang of pure relief that Raffles had not stooped to conciliate me, my second a hot shame that I had been idiot enough even for one moment to believe him capable of doing so. Then the full significance of the two rubies flashed across me.
&nbs
p; “An imitation?” I gasped, falling back into my chair.
“An exact replica.”
“For Holmes?”
He nodded.
“But supposing he—”
“That’s a risk I have to take.”
“Then I go with you.”
A savage gleam lit up the steel-blue eyes.
“I don’t want you.”
“Holmes may spot it. I must share the risk.”
“You fool, you’d double it!”
“Raffles!” The cry of pain was wrung from me before I could check it, but if there was weakness in my self-betrayal, I could not regret it when I saw the softening in his wonderful eyes.
“I didn’t mean it, Bunny,” he said.
“Then you’ll take me!” I cried, and held my breath through an endless half-minute, until a consenting nod brought me to my feet again. The hand that shot out to grasp his was met halfway, and a twinkling eye belied the doleful resignation in his “What an obstinate rabbit it is!”
—
Our appointment with Holmes was for the following evening at nine. The clocks of London were striking the half-hour after eight when I entered the Albany. My dear villain, in evening dress, worn as only he could wear it, was standing by the table; but there was that in his attitude which struck the greeting dumb upon my lips. My eyes followed the direction of his, and I saw the two rubies side by side in their open cases.
“What is it, Raffles?” I cried. “Has anything happened?”
“It’s no good, Bunny,” he said, looking up. “I can’t risk it. With anyone else I’d chance it, and be damned to the consequences, too. But Holmes—no, Bunny! I was a fool ever to play with the idea.”
I could not speak. The bitterness of my disappointment, the depth of my disillusion, took me by the throat and choked me. That Raffles should be knocked out I could have borne, that he should let the fight go by default—there was the shame to which I could fit no words.
